It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself, unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most minute detail.

No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet and blindly becomes a chain.

A bird is joy incarnate.

Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

[On marriage:] Someone once said that it was like a crowded church - those outside were endeavouring to get in, and those inside were making violent efforts to get out.

Conceit is lovable and unconcealed ; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden.